CDH Workshop - From Letters to Data: Digitizing 19th-Century Student Travelogues (with a guest talk by Jörg Wettlaufer)
What happens when handwritten letters meet digital methods? This workshop traces the journeys of 19th-century Groningen students as they move from ink on paper to maps, data, and new forms of insight.
Through a series of short presentations convened by students in the MA Digital Humanities (Stephan Sportel, Koen Snelten and Tijn Donners), we present projects that visualize travel routes and uncover networks of people and places—bringing past mobility to life in new ways. Along the way, we explore how knowledge can be drawn from historical texts, from identifying individuals to mapping Dutch toponyms, and how these journeys can be modeled using the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model.
An invited talk on travel in the Ottoman Empire (Jörg Wettlaufer, Coordinator Digitization at the Academy of Sciences and Humanities Göttingen Germany) opens up an international perspective: Travelogues in Digital History. Showcasing digiberichte.de and middle-east-travelers.de as an example.
Travelogues are among the most promising yet methodologically demanding source genres for Digital History. They preserve dense descriptions and eyewitness of routes, places, material culture, social interaction, political conditions, and perceptions of cultural difference. At the same time, they are shaped by authorial subjectivity, literary conventions, power asymmetries, intertextual borrowing, and occasional fictionalization. Rather than disqualifying travelogues as historical evidence, these tensions make them particularly suitable for digitally supported source criticism and large-scale corpus analysis. Digital methods enable historians not only to search and compare large bodies of text systematically, but also to reconstruct mobility, visualize spatial patterns and discover the perception of “otherness” in the lens of a particular culture.
In this talk I will present two Göttingen-based digital projects as examples of how travelogues and their metadata can be transformed into digital research environments: digiberichte.de, devoted to late medieval European travel reports, and middle-east-travelers.de, focused on travelogues to the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. Taken together, the development of these projects illustrates a shift from retrospective digitization and online presentation toward modular infrastructures, interoperable data, and research software engineering. Digiberichte.de began in 2007 as a retro digitization project and has evolved through several major iterations into an infrastructure combining bibliographic metadata, full-text retrieval of primary and secondary sources, and itinerary mapping.
The “Middle East Travelers” project was started in 2018 by Deniz T. Kılınçoğlu and myself with the aim to build a multilingual corpus of English-, French-, and German-language travelogues in order to investigate the rise of nationalism in nineteenth-century Middle East through the perspectives of eyewitnesses. The project never received proper funding, but has been revived recently using the architecture developed for digiberichte.de and adapted to the particular data collected from 19th-century travelogues. While the implementation of middle-east-travelers.de has been only basic since its original conception, information retrieval from the travelogues now relies on Apache Solr, embedded in a WordPress frontend. The project combines corpus building, metadata collection and the development of a text mining environment that supports researchers in answering all kinds of questions on the material of identity formation, inter-communal relations, and nationalism.
A central methodological extension of this research concerns the identification and visualization of itineraries. In (digital) editions of travelogues, plotting routes on maps is common practice; yet the simple recognition of place names is not sufficient, since many texts mention locations that are not part of the traveler’s actual route. Recent work connected to the project therefore proposes an annotation schema that models not only places, but also persons, travel participants, and the spatial temporal relations linking them. On this basis, itinerary extraction can be refined beyond standard named-entity recognition, and recent experiments explore how large language models may support this complex annotation task for historical texts. This approach opens up new possibilities for reconstructing valid travel routes from large corpora and for relating textual evidence, movement, and historical space more precisely.
By showcasing both projects, the presentation argues that travelogues are an especially instructive test case for Digital History because they require the combination of hermeneutic interpretation, critical source analysis, and computational methods. At the same time, they demonstrate that long-term scholarly accessibility and value depends not only on digitized texts and metadata, but also on adaptable and modularized technical architectures that provide access to the research data.